CRITICAL REALISM
Critical Realism as a trend in American literature reached full development
after the Civil War. But already before it writers and men of reason turned
their thought to the material environment around them. The deep-going changes
in the country, the new type of human relations that had come into being compelled
them to see man as a product of his environment, to deal with actual facts and
realities. Hitherto writers had built their stories around ideal individuals
through which they portrayed their own personal emotions and reactions. This
no longer satisfied the new generation of writers; they realized that the people
must be represented as a whole, the life of the individual interlinked with
that of other human beings. The highly critical realistic literature that came
into being differed greatly from that of the previous generation represented
by Irving, Cooper and Longfellow.
Mark Twain in his”Gilded Age” wrote: "The eight years in America
from I860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the
politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country and wrought
so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be
measured."
Critical Realism embraced all aspects of American life. Many of the old themes
were the same but they were treated in a new light including that of love, and
of the role of art and the artist in society. The romantic school had treated
love as a refuge from the commonplace in practical
life; the realists used the theme to show up the immorality of bourgeois society
which made love and marriage a matter of business. The romanticists understood
the role of art and the artist merely as a great power which could conjure up
visions and influence the outlook of men and women; without denying this, realists
also showed how the bourgeois commercialization of art and the artist could
destroy the noble role of art and reduce it to a commodity.
The realists saw man on the background of social conflicts of the day I and
analysed human nature and human emotions in relation to this background. The
reader could imagine the past and the future of each I literary personage because
the development of the image was closely linked with the historical development
of the present. The American realists rejected sentimentality and the "genteel
tradition” in the I style of writing. Their portrayal of life, as they
found it, may sometimes have been rude and unpolished but it was always original
and truthful.
Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser were
among the many writers of that period .whose works were I brilliant examples
of mature realism.
American Critical Realism developed in contact with European realism; it was
greatly influenced by Balzac, Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy. But American realism
enriched world realism by advancing the problems of social injustice, the Negro
and Indian questions, the fate of the young generation and the problem of emancipation
of women.
The American ruling classes used every possible means to prevent the development
of realism in literature and the exposure of the true nature of capitalist society.
They organized a campaign of persecution against realist writers: slandered
them in the commercial press, closed the doors of the publishing houses to them,
made existence impossible for the independent author. Many were forced to leave
the United States, among them Bret Harte. But the frantic witch-hunt was powerless
against the progressive forces in American literature. American authors armed
with the methods of Critical Realism created great works of art which served
to unmask the truth about the reactionary foundations of modern imperialism,
and served to greatly influence the struggle for social justice.
